TummelVision 62: Andy Carvin of NPR.org on twitter journalism, tummelling the world, and truth-seeking through vulnerability

Episode Notes

Andy Carvin (@acarvin) is digital strategist for National Public Radio. He has helped NPR create their pioneering online presence, coordinated multiple crisis camps, and he’s organized the PublicMediaCamp unconference. In recent months, Andy has engaged in a globalized twitter-enabled form of tummelled journalism as he has curated, fact-checked, and shared news from the Arab democratic revolutions (and other international stories).

Heather Gold writes that Andy Carvin may be the most “successful” tummler on the web:

We’ve wanted to have Andy on for some time. I got to know him a while back and noticed how involved he was in the tech community , how open and vulnerable he was on twitter about his own life and things he’s personally coped with and how much he seemed to commit to crisis camps, in which web and IT folks get together and hack on problems to help an ongoing humanitarian crisis, such as the recent earthquake in Japan.

Andy’s commitment and knowledge about the web, community and human rights all converged into a really critical moment for the web on twitter at the end of 2010 as revolution began bubbling in Tunisia. Andy tummeled the hell out of what was going on there on the ground. He then became a key point on the web and for western journalism (possibly beyond the west too, but in the spirit of Andy’s work, we could not verify this so we’re not asserting it). Andy connected first person sources, organizers, social media participants, journalists and many regular folks around the world who just became all of these things as the world was astonished by the organizing and democratic movements that swept through Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

In doing so, Andy showed by example, how to create community, connect people, verify and ask for verification about news. And rather than just being a digital strategist and community advisor at NPR, he now seems to be a journalist and a story as the web, revolution and tummelling shift what all those things mean.

Enjoy our conversation with Andy!

News and Notes

The Huffington Pose: Using the seductive and tantalizing tricks of a modern-day courtesan, the new media mogul puts a brave new world under her spell – Hephzibah Anderson in ADWEEK

Question, The Internet has a really bad Bright Shiny Object problem. From the Olden Days with Gopher to Twitter, what is Salient (cats & kid photos or top 10 lists) is often the enemy of Valid. What gets too much attention in your work..and field, ..what’s getting missed? IE. What doesn’t fit in a tweet or 3 paragraph blog post?